First good shower too little too late for farmers

               By Joydeep Gupta

             Indo-Asian News Service

      Sohna (Haryana), July 28 (IANS) The season's first good shower came too late for Mohan Singh's rice nursery where the saplings are dead. His bajra crop is ruined too, as his pump could not raise water from the falling aquifer below his farm. He hopes his sugarcane patch will revive now.

      Monday's shower marginally reduced the 55 percent monsoon rainfall deficit in Haryana's Gurgaon district where this village is located, but it will not be enough to get Mohan and his neighbours out of debt.

      "I can do nothing for the rice any more," Mohan told IANS while he worked feverishly to chop out small channels so that as much of the rainwater would get to his sugarcane patch as possible.

      "It's been more than 40 days since the rice saplings were planted; so even if some of them are alive, they are too big to be transplanted to the main farm," Mohan explained. "It's a complete loss."

      So is his bajra patch as the coarse grain does need water throughout its growth cycle though it does not need a lot of it.

      "I could have grown my bajra even with this low rainfall if I had been able to irrigate my patch a little," Mohan rued. "But the water table fell below the point from which I could raise water with my pump.

      "I'm already in debt this year. I could not borrow more to dig a deeper bore. The water just vanished. It must be due to the water these huge pumps are taking away for the new houses here."

      Sohna village is now almost on the border of new realty developments that have spread from Gurgaon, the town adjacent to the Indian capital. In the absence of water supply from the municipal authorities, real estate developers have been forced to sink deep tubewells and powerful pumps for residents. The result is an overall fall in the area's water table.

      Mohan's neighbours who do have deeper borewells and pumps attached to them said it did not help. "There was no electricity most of the time, so we could not run the pumps," said Narain Singh.

      "The (real estate) developers have huge generators, so they can run their pumps all the time. We'll not be able to repay our loans this year. There's nothing we can do. God knows how we'll feed our families."

      (Joydeep Gupta can be contacted at joydeep.g@ians.in)

     Indo-Asian News Service

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